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Does Your Website Have The X Factor When It Comes To Perceived Credibility?

Posted on 16. Sep, 2009 by Lyz in blog, website optimisation

Professional website design – why is it so important to get right?

You know that first impressions count and the way your website looks is the single most important factor when establishing web credibility. You only have a second or two to make a favourable impression before you’ve lost that potential customer for good.

A professionally designed website has high aesthetic quality and so high perceived credibility – consumers are just more willing to buy from a company with a well designed website.

Professionally designed websites tend to follow the latest best practice guidelines – they conform to accepted and tested usability standards. In fact they share many common elements, they:

• Feature a credible logo
• Have a pleasing colour scheme
• Position elements of the page in line with established conventions
• Are consistent throughout
• Use clear, well labeled navigation
• Use relevant, good-quality imagery
• Have a clear information hierarchy
• Use persuasive, benefit-orientated copy
• Are coded with W3C valid markup
• Don’t contain mistakes
• Are just easy to use

Get this wrong and you risk high bounce-rates and low conversion rates. To find out if your website measures up then try my free website optimisation report system and see how well optimised your web pages are for conversion.

Tags: conversion rates, professional website design, website optimisation